Caitlin Hicks

PLAYWRIGHT. AUTHOR. PERFORMER. PRESENTER.

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A coming-of-age story about a feisty adolescent in an enormous, noisy Catholic family.

A Theory of Expanded Love is a coming-of-age story featuring an unflinching, gullible skeptic, trapped in her enormous Catholic family in 1963. Annie Shea is on the verge of adolescence: young enough to want a doll for Christmas, yet old enough to be responsible for the care and feeding of five younger brothers and sisters. Desperate for attention in the rambling, haphazard mess of a home where privacy is non-existent and conformity the rule, Annie sees her chance for glory when the pope dies and a family friend is on the short list to be elected the first American pope. She begins a hilarious campaign of lies-by-association with the Cardinal to elevate her tribe to the holiest of holy rollers in her parish.

But when Annie discovers a closely-held family secret and a wedding photograph of her mother next to a soldier who is not her father; when ‘The Hands’ visit her at night, as her sister faces a scandal, Annie finds that her parents will do almost anything to uphold their Catholic reputation. Questioning all she has believed, and torn between her own gut instinct and years of Catholic guilt, Annie runs away from home to wrest salvation from the tragic sequence of events set in motion by her parents’ betrayal, while remaining loyal to herself – and her own quirky, crystal clear logic.

Published in 2015 by Light Messages, North Carolina

In 2023, Brown Posey Press, an imprint of Sunbury Press in Pennsylvania re-published the novel, alongside the second in the series, KENNEDY GIRL.